Chapter 6 - Comparative analysis and argument
6.2 Conclusion
the (P)IRA … with the UDA and UFV killing Catholics, internment; Bloody Sunday – all those things made the (P)IRA”.127
violence, half personally knew someone that was either killed or injure, and one in seven were victims of violence themselves.129 The communal violence in Basque Country was never near to the extent it was in Northern Ireland. Basque nationalists and non-nationalists never engaged in tit-for-tat violence the way republicans and unionists did in Northern Ireland. Once the Spanish state, in its transition to democracy, granted a certain level of autonomy to the Basque Country and turned to legal and discriminate counterterrorist measures – ETA was stripped of its support as Basques were less and less willing to tolerate violence perpetrated by it. Their experience as part of the Spanish state was becoming better and even if some of them still strived for independence, they did not deem ETA’s means of achieving it tolerable. On the other hand, the experience of the Catholic Irish in Northern Ireland was permeated with violence by the British military/police, but even more so by loyalist paramilitaries. As a result, they were more willing to relativize innocent victims and keep support for the PIRA even in the face of the indiscriminate attacks they conducted. This difference in support, in effect, appears to have been the crucial distinction that resulted in the different outcomes of these two campaigns.
129 Bernadette C. Hayes and Ian Mcallister, "Public Support for Political Violence and Paramilitarism in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland," Terrorism and Political Violence 17, no. 4 (2005): 614.
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CONCLUSION
This thesis set out to find what accounted for the difference in outcomes in the cases of the PIRA and ETA campaigns. Combing historical facts with relevant literature, it analyzed three possible factors that could influence the outcome. The results showed that different levels of support and differing direction of political/military strategy played a significant part in the outcome. Taking into account how critical the support of the ethnic constituency is for the success of an ethno-nationalist terrorist campaign, this thesis argued that support is the highest explanatory variable. Moreover, as both groups targeted approximately the same percentage of civilians, this thesis argued that different support levels depend on the “tolerance limit” for violence. Consequently, the different levels of support that may be ascribed the highest explanatory value were contingent on how tolerant the ethnic constituency was of the terrorist group's indiscriminate violence. This thesis contends that the PIRA’s ethnic constituency had a higher degree of tolerance for violence, as it was a more frequent target of violence than ETA’s ethnic constituency. This caused them to develop higher preferences for revenge and in turn kept the support for the PIRA relatively high. As both campaigns were in essence wars of attrition against the state, when ETA’s constituency withdrew its support, it had to concede.
This thesis contributes to the literature by presenting a credible explanatory logic for the relationship between a terrorist organization, its target selection and its ethnic constituency.
Moreover, it sets out a model of comparison (based on variables of goals, support, and strategy) that may be replicated for other comparisons. The strength of the argument regarding the positive correlation between being a victim of violence and “tolerance limit” for violence perpetrated by the terrorist group that seeks to obtain revenge in one’s name would benefit from testing it on more case studies.
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It is important to outline that this research is not an exhaustive assembly of factors that have influenced the outcome. As the primary focus of this thesis was inquiry into the decisions made by the ethno-nationalist terrorist groups themselves and their relationship with their respective constituency, some plausible factors that affected the outcome have not been discussed as they were not in the scope of the research. Those factors would be the existence and financial support from Irish diaspora in United States of America, the relatively higher level of discrimination in Northern Ireland compared to Basque Country (after Spain’s democratic transition), and the existence of a neighboring state in Ireland in which the ethnic kin of the ethno-nationalist terrorist group constituted a majority. Further research comparing these two cases ought to include these factors to determine if, and to what extent, they may have influenced the outcome, taking into account the finding of this thesis.
The argument made in this thesis explained the difference in these two cases and the mechanism behind the support for ethno-nationalist terrorist organizations. In terms of its implications for decision makers, it shows that indiscriminate repression of an entire ethnic group will not result in defeating the ethno-nationalist terrorist organization. However, discriminate and legal repression of those who engage in violence combined with efforts to mitigate legitimate grievances will yield much better results, stripping the terrorist group of its legitimacy. The PIRA was well aware of the necessity not to alienate itself from its constituency, whereas ETA only eventually realized that without the support of its constituency, its armed struggle was doing more damage than good to the ethno-nationalist cause.
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